Complete and unabridged, with 54 full-page plates by Edvard Munch, Thomas Bardwell and Pietro Bellotti. Nuremberg in 1281: a smith's forge, a knight, a girl of the patrician class, and an Emperor — Rudolph of Hapsburg — holding a diet in a city where the guilds and the old families are not speaking. Ebers found the medical papyrus that bears his name and dug in Egypt for years; the free imperial city here is reconstructed from charters, and the forge is not a metaphor. Fifty-four plates of castles and coastal fortifications, from Peel Castle to Windsor, by painters including Thomas Bardwell and Robert George Kelly, give the medieval world of the romance its visual counterpart.